Brian Sudlow | Aston University (original) (raw)
Papers by Brian Sudlow
This book is the first comparative study of its kind to explore at length the French and English ... more This book is the first comparative study of its kind to explore at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. It also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes which are considered to be emblematic of Catholic literature. The breadth of this book will make it a useful guide for students wishing to become familiar with a wide range of such writings in France and England during this period. It will also appeal to researchers interested in Catholic literary and intellectual history in France and England, theologians, philosophers and students of the sociology of religion. CONTENTS: Preface and acknowledgements Introduction 1. Individual and societal secularisation in France and England 2. Recovering the porous individual 3. Thinking and believing 4. The fragments of secular society 5. Mending secular fragmentation 6. Ultimate societal values 7. Catholic religiosity and the hierarchical Church 8. Catholic religiosity and the charismatic Church Conclusion Bibliography Index
Modern & Contemporary France, Apr 23, 2020
Vincent Kaufmann's Ménage à trois: littérature, médecine, religion (2007) sets up the category of... more Vincent Kaufmann's Ménage à trois: littérature, médecine, religion (2007) sets up the category of the médico-religieux as a tool to understand the intersection of medicine and religion within French literature. This article aims to contest this paradigm, not only in the spirit of Felski's hostility to the hermeneutics of suspicion (2015) but also because Kaufmann's account of the religious is too dependent on a Weberian model of the instrumental-rational and thereby insensitive to patterns of religious self-understanding. To illustrate and deepen this objection to Kaufmann's notion of the medico-religious, the article offers a reading of three plays by Fabrice Hadjadj, contemporary France's most prolific Catholic writer, especially by using the concept of the theandric encounter (a meeting of the divine and the human) which is sensitive to the possibility of the value-rational in a medicoreligious imaginary but does not exclude the instrumental-rational. Massacre des innocents (2006), Pasiphaé (2008) and Jeanne et les posthumains (2014) all evoke in different ways elements of the medico-religious, including the evasion of pain and the instrumental uses of religion. Nevertheless, they also attempt to articulate an axis of the imagination that traverses the purely instrumental through experiences of religion that are epiphanic and transformational.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Jun 12, 2017
Réflexions pour 1985, a prospective report published in 1964, envisaged what France might look li... more Réflexions pour 1985, a prospective report published in 1964, envisaged what France might look like in 1985. This article argues that the blend of 'probable' and 'desirable' in its imagined vision of the future reveals an agenda of enforcing social compliance with its techno-scientific assumptions. To test such an assessment of the text, this article offers a study of the shaping factors and shaping actors of the report, before analysing the language of the report itself.
Ashgate eBooks, Dec 1, 2012
Life does not live', the epigram deployed by Theodor Adomo at the start of Minima Moralia, embodi... more Life does not live', the epigram deployed by Theodor Adomo at the start of Minima Moralia, embodied Adorno's conviction that life could not flourish at a time when production superseded it in importance.' In the dedication to this very work, Adomo observes caustically: 'Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer'. 2 The Minima Moralia reflect on the fallout of this ideology in the bourgeois-created, consumerled Western societies of the mid-twentieth century. Undoubtedly, his other source of pessimism in this work can be located in the long shadow of the concentration camp, the gloom of which had reached Adomo in his US exile during World War II: 'The subject still fe. els sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself'. 3 Paradoxically, as if the subject's autonomy were always dependent on social recognition, this collapse of subjectivity resulted from the impact which total exclusion from the community had had on the individual within the paradigm of the camp. Indeed, what could be more isolating, and thereby more destructive for the individual, than to be thrust beyond the realms of recognized humanity, subject to unbridled violence, and exiled to the darkness outside human and divine law where Giorgio Agamben will locate his homo sacer? It is right to elect major cultural commentators like Adomo as our interlocutors, as we seek to try to understand ourselves, our history and our very own life. However bad the concentration camps were, nevertheless, the pre-Holocaust world itself was far from Edenic. Without wishing to mobilize the Holocaust for any cause whatsoever, one cannot help drawing correlations between the isolation and death which it so emblematically r~presents to Adorno's mind and to ours, and the forms of isolation, dislocation and death-beyond the alienating effects of overproduction lamented by Adomo-experienced by many Western people
Manchester University Press eBooks, Jul 19, 2013
The Chesterton Review, 2010
Manchester University Press eBooks, Aug 31, 2011
French Studies Bulletin, Mar 1, 2010
Cultural Politics: An International Journal, Jul 1, 2015
Padilha's new Robocop film can be read in the light of Paul Virilio's theoretical work, notably D... more Padilha's new Robocop film can be read in the light of Paul Virilio's theoretical work, notably Desert Screen. Robocop serves as the city's warrior but also as a munition in the hands of global media forces. Still, even if the film presents the fallibility of robotic technology, its true failure is in sustaining the progressivist myth of technology perfectly under human control.
Oeuvres et critiques, Dec 31, 2019
The Chesterton Review, 2007
Quaestiones disputatae, 2013
Manchester University Press eBooks, Jul 19, 2013
Manchester University Press eBooks, Jul 19, 2013
French Studies, Jun 17, 2021
The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, Jun 17, 2020
, 122 pp < https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01794385/document > is a collection of cultural a... more , 122 pp < https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01794385/document > is a collection of cultural and literary studies by a range of junior academics, mostly doctoral students of the Centre d'Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines, that enriches our understanding of the history of the body seen through a variety of contexts and methodological lenses. While Marie Kawthar Daouda, 'La Ver de terre amoureux du cadavre : sublimation du corps putride dans l'héritage romantique du finde-siècle' (81-92) draws insightfully on construals of the dead body in fin-de siècle literature, the essay by Marion Simonin 'Corps sensible, corps imaginaire. La poésie de Jules Supervielle et Henri Michaux' (62-70) explores from an illuminating philosophical perspective how evolving concepts of the body had an impact on Supervielle's and Michaux's poetic depiction of corporeal reality. Portraits dans la littérature: De Gustave Flaubert à Marcel Proust, ed. Julie Anselmini and Fabienne Bercegol, Garnier, 472 pp. is a collection of studies that came out of an international conference on the same topic held at Cerisy in August 2016. The essays provide a broad panorama of the relations of portraiture to French literature in late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, thereby bringing under scrutiny a literary reference point that is seldom mentioned by critics or historians of literature. Of particular interest is Stéphane Chaudier, 'Proust et l'art du portrait' (53-79) which evokes P.'s uses of the literary portrait no longer with respect to its artistic equivalent but now in its own right. Paradoxically, as he argues, P.'s portraits are not what they seem from the perspective of representativity, their very ambiguity being only one of the author's many subtle devices.
Modern & Contemporary France, Aug 16, 2017
Manchester University Press eBooks, Aug 31, 2011
The Chesterton Review, 2009
The Chesterton Review, 2012
This book is the first comparative study of its kind to explore at length the French and English ... more This book is the first comparative study of its kind to explore at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. It also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes which are considered to be emblematic of Catholic literature. The breadth of this book will make it a useful guide for students wishing to become familiar with a wide range of such writings in France and England during this period. It will also appeal to researchers interested in Catholic literary and intellectual history in France and England, theologians, philosophers and students of the sociology of religion. CONTENTS: Preface and acknowledgements Introduction 1. Individual and societal secularisation in France and England 2. Recovering the porous individual 3. Thinking and believing 4. The fragments of secular society 5. Mending secular fragmentation 6. Ultimate societal values 7. Catholic religiosity and the hierarchical Church 8. Catholic religiosity and the charismatic Church Conclusion Bibliography Index
Modern & Contemporary France, Apr 23, 2020
Vincent Kaufmann's Ménage à trois: littérature, médecine, religion (2007) sets up the category of... more Vincent Kaufmann's Ménage à trois: littérature, médecine, religion (2007) sets up the category of the médico-religieux as a tool to understand the intersection of medicine and religion within French literature. This article aims to contest this paradigm, not only in the spirit of Felski's hostility to the hermeneutics of suspicion (2015) but also because Kaufmann's account of the religious is too dependent on a Weberian model of the instrumental-rational and thereby insensitive to patterns of religious self-understanding. To illustrate and deepen this objection to Kaufmann's notion of the medico-religious, the article offers a reading of three plays by Fabrice Hadjadj, contemporary France's most prolific Catholic writer, especially by using the concept of the theandric encounter (a meeting of the divine and the human) which is sensitive to the possibility of the value-rational in a medicoreligious imaginary but does not exclude the instrumental-rational. Massacre des innocents (2006), Pasiphaé (2008) and Jeanne et les posthumains (2014) all evoke in different ways elements of the medico-religious, including the evasion of pain and the instrumental uses of religion. Nevertheless, they also attempt to articulate an axis of the imagination that traverses the purely instrumental through experiences of religion that are epiphanic and transformational.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Jun 12, 2017
Réflexions pour 1985, a prospective report published in 1964, envisaged what France might look li... more Réflexions pour 1985, a prospective report published in 1964, envisaged what France might look like in 1985. This article argues that the blend of 'probable' and 'desirable' in its imagined vision of the future reveals an agenda of enforcing social compliance with its techno-scientific assumptions. To test such an assessment of the text, this article offers a study of the shaping factors and shaping actors of the report, before analysing the language of the report itself.
Ashgate eBooks, Dec 1, 2012
Life does not live', the epigram deployed by Theodor Adomo at the start of Minima Moralia, embodi... more Life does not live', the epigram deployed by Theodor Adomo at the start of Minima Moralia, embodied Adorno's conviction that life could not flourish at a time when production superseded it in importance.' In the dedication to this very work, Adomo observes caustically: 'Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer'. 2 The Minima Moralia reflect on the fallout of this ideology in the bourgeois-created, consumerled Western societies of the mid-twentieth century. Undoubtedly, his other source of pessimism in this work can be located in the long shadow of the concentration camp, the gloom of which had reached Adomo in his US exile during World War II: 'The subject still fe. els sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself'. 3 Paradoxically, as if the subject's autonomy were always dependent on social recognition, this collapse of subjectivity resulted from the impact which total exclusion from the community had had on the individual within the paradigm of the camp. Indeed, what could be more isolating, and thereby more destructive for the individual, than to be thrust beyond the realms of recognized humanity, subject to unbridled violence, and exiled to the darkness outside human and divine law where Giorgio Agamben will locate his homo sacer? It is right to elect major cultural commentators like Adomo as our interlocutors, as we seek to try to understand ourselves, our history and our very own life. However bad the concentration camps were, nevertheless, the pre-Holocaust world itself was far from Edenic. Without wishing to mobilize the Holocaust for any cause whatsoever, one cannot help drawing correlations between the isolation and death which it so emblematically r~presents to Adorno's mind and to ours, and the forms of isolation, dislocation and death-beyond the alienating effects of overproduction lamented by Adomo-experienced by many Western people
Manchester University Press eBooks, Jul 19, 2013
The Chesterton Review, 2010
Manchester University Press eBooks, Aug 31, 2011
French Studies Bulletin, Mar 1, 2010
Cultural Politics: An International Journal, Jul 1, 2015
Padilha's new Robocop film can be read in the light of Paul Virilio's theoretical work, notably D... more Padilha's new Robocop film can be read in the light of Paul Virilio's theoretical work, notably Desert Screen. Robocop serves as the city's warrior but also as a munition in the hands of global media forces. Still, even if the film presents the fallibility of robotic technology, its true failure is in sustaining the progressivist myth of technology perfectly under human control.
Oeuvres et critiques, Dec 31, 2019
The Chesterton Review, 2007
Quaestiones disputatae, 2013
Manchester University Press eBooks, Jul 19, 2013
Manchester University Press eBooks, Jul 19, 2013
French Studies, Jun 17, 2021
The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, Jun 17, 2020
, 122 pp < https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01794385/document > is a collection of cultural a... more , 122 pp < https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01794385/document > is a collection of cultural and literary studies by a range of junior academics, mostly doctoral students of the Centre d'Histoire Culturelle des Sociétés Contemporaines, that enriches our understanding of the history of the body seen through a variety of contexts and methodological lenses. While Marie Kawthar Daouda, 'La Ver de terre amoureux du cadavre : sublimation du corps putride dans l'héritage romantique du finde-siècle' (81-92) draws insightfully on construals of the dead body in fin-de siècle literature, the essay by Marion Simonin 'Corps sensible, corps imaginaire. La poésie de Jules Supervielle et Henri Michaux' (62-70) explores from an illuminating philosophical perspective how evolving concepts of the body had an impact on Supervielle's and Michaux's poetic depiction of corporeal reality. Portraits dans la littérature: De Gustave Flaubert à Marcel Proust, ed. Julie Anselmini and Fabienne Bercegol, Garnier, 472 pp. is a collection of studies that came out of an international conference on the same topic held at Cerisy in August 2016. The essays provide a broad panorama of the relations of portraiture to French literature in late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, thereby bringing under scrutiny a literary reference point that is seldom mentioned by critics or historians of literature. Of particular interest is Stéphane Chaudier, 'Proust et l'art du portrait' (53-79) which evokes P.'s uses of the literary portrait no longer with respect to its artistic equivalent but now in its own right. Paradoxically, as he argues, P.'s portraits are not what they seem from the perspective of representativity, their very ambiguity being only one of the author's many subtle devices.
Modern & Contemporary France, Aug 16, 2017
Manchester University Press eBooks, Aug 31, 2011
The Chesterton Review, 2009
The Chesterton Review, 2012